How were the terms East and West variously interpreted with regard to Russian identity?

Eurasianism. The movement goes back to some essays written by Count Nicolai Trubetzkoy, an aristocratic linguist, in 1913. They were called "The spirit of Genghis Khan." In 1923, in exile in Sophia, Bulgaria, three more aristocrats joined him and launched what they saw as an alternative to Soviet ideology. Thus was born the Eurasian movement. It survived for about a decade in Russian emigre communities in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Kaunas. It had Soviet versions, as seen in the work of Lev Gumilev, the historian. Recently, it has been revived as so-called neo-Eurasianism by Alexander Dugin, and has had some influence on the Kremlin's rhetoric today. There are even "Russian Muslim Eurasians" today. The theory, as stated by Trubetskoy, goes back to the ideas of East and West. But here Russia is a combination of East and West, of Europe and Asia; it is Eurasian. It gets the Eurasian spirit from the Chingizid (from Jengis Khan) empire. Before Jengis Khan, Russia was just Rus, a small Christian princedom. Rus became Russia when it moved into the space administered and unified by Jenghis Khan and his successors. Far from being a "yoke" (tataro-mongolskoe igo), the Mongols had many good qualities: a respect for political authority that came from seeing the ruler as close to the divine; a religious tolerance where shamanism, Islam, Christianity and Buddhisms were practiced by different peoples without interference; an efficient administrative system that united varied people into one political unit. This traditional, authoritarian, religious political entity was adapted by Russians who added an Orthodox spirit to it, which however still left room for other expressions of Eurasian spirituality.

How is Nicolai Fedorov a bridge between pre-Soviet and Soviet Russianness?

 

Fedorov took Russian Orthodoxy and added a modernist twist to it. He believed that Russian Orthodoxy different from Western Christianity in its emphasis on the resurrection and the religious brotherhood of believers that derives from the fatherhood of God and the sonship of Christ. However, he took Christian salvation rather literally. Instead of passively waiting for the return of Christ and the resurrection of humanity, he believed we needed to take a modern active stance. That is, we should develop the technology to dig up our beloved fathers, and give them life, to resurrect them. Then there would be no need for the pointless "progress" which the corrupt West was always going on about. Mankind would live as one happy technologically resurrected family under the guidance of their wise ancestors and under the supervision of their father God. This set him thinking about overpopulation and a natural conclusion was that mankind would have to colonize the stars in order to cope with all the newly resurrected fathers. You can see that this takes ancient religious ideas and gives them a surprising modernist twist. In a less, ahem, insane way, this mix of ancient tradition and hyper-modernity characterizes much of Soviet communism, which thus continues the odd Westernizing-Slavophile impetus of Fedorov, Herzen and others.

 

 

MODERN CHINA

1. Why was Japan considered the ‘hope of Asia’ at the beginning of the 20^th century?

In the 1853 ‘free-trade’ agreement with trading posts in Japan was set up between Britain, Holland, and Russia. As a result, many Japanese had been educated in the West, Western clothing had been adopted. Such transition to the Western culture happened due to the fact that traditional ruling class (homogeneous and small) actually pursued, supported this modernization. Then, Japanese managed to persuade British to give up their territories in Japan by presenting themselves as Anglophiles (clothing, education, constitution). Few years after Japan won a war against China over Korea and a major war against Russia in 1904-1905. As a result, Japanese were no longer ashamed to stand before the world as Japanese. Japan was the first non-European country to resist colonization.

 

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